Calendars are a widely used device for tracking the passage of time, for organizing activities, and providing reminders. Many calendars are printed on bi-fold paper with a grid of dates marked in weeks on one sheet and a decorative image printed on the other. The grid of dates is frequently large enough to accommodate written schedule reminders.
Most calendars include a year of dates and are organized around months and present a month of dates together with a decorative element, usually an image or graphic. Other calendars record a time span other than a year, for example a month or a season, for example the competitive season for a sporting team, or for a holiday season, such as the Christmas and New Year's holidays celebrated in many countries.
Calendars for a new year are often given as year-end gifts from one person to another and are personalized with images reminding the gift receiver of the gift giver. For example, children can make a calendar that includes pictures of their family and their family's activities throughout the year and give it to their grandparents.
In the past, creating such personalized calendars required significant work. Image selection, copying, and drawing calendars were expensive and labor-intensive. In recent years, calendar kits have become available that ease the task. In some cases, the kits provide preprinted calendars with suitable mounts for individual images. In other cases, computer software and layout tools are used together with digital images to create a personalized calendar. Nonetheless, the calendar creation task requires significant effort, particularly for the selection and layout of suitable images. This issue is becoming increasingly problematic, as the number of digital images that consumers make is becoming very large and reviewing them is increasingly tedious.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,986,671 describes a method of combining digital images within a template and illustrates the use of the method with a calendar. U.S. Pat. No. 6,186,553 and U.S. Pat. No. 7,090,253 describe the construction of a theme calendar using computer-aided layout tools and computer stored artwork. However, none of these prior-art methods address one of the central difficulties of personalized calendar creation, the selection of suitable images from a potentially large set of images.
In U.K. Patent Application GB2403304A, Rowe describes a method of labeling images with labels based on the image capture dates corresponding to national events (and seasons) for later use in text-based search and retrieval of images. However, not all images have reliable metadata for dates nor are all suitable for, or representative of, a desired season.
U.S. Patent Application 2007/0177805 describes a method of searching through a collection of images, includes providing a list of individuals of interest and features associated with such individuals; detecting people in the image collection; determining the likelihoods for each listed individual of appearing in each collection image in response to the detected people and the features associated with the listed individuals; and selecting in response to the determined likelihoods a number of collection images such that each individual from the list appears in the selected number of collection images. This enables a user to locate images of particular people but does not necessarily assist in finding suitable images for a particular season.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,271,809 describes a method for using viewing time to determine affective information in an imaging system that is employed to estimate user preferences for an image. This enables a user to locate preferred images but does not necessarily assist in finding suitable images for a particular season.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method for personalizing an image product and making suitable image selections for the product.